I’d love to see a blog engine that structurally encouraged editing old posts, much like a private wiki with an activity stream view. Readers would both be able to peruse articles/posts/entries either in order of creation or of last edit, but also view a timeline of edits, along with an easily-understood diff of the edits.

Yes, I know this is possible with github/jekyll-based blogs, but that’s not exactly friendly for a broad audience. I may build this for my own blog, since I’m more interested in building up a well-edited collection of essays than standard short-form blogging. Let me know in the comments what you think!

Last weekend, I became involved in a project called Tweak the Tweet. I wanted to put into writing my perspective on the project, its long-term viability, and the role I see it playing in the crisis-response tool chain.

In the broadest sense, I’m discussing the notion of tools built on the Twitter platform specifically for use in emergency response and crisis management. More specifically, I’m discussing the various technology efforts currently organized under the Tweak-the-Tweet banner. To be absolutely clear, I speak only for myself, not for the direction of the project.

At any given time in the past few years, I’ve had a few projects active at the same time, from little experiments to forks of open source projects to code for various jobs. Over time, I’ve developed a little bash ditty to help me manage switching between projects, and I wanted to share that today.

I’ve been playing with Hadoop quite a bit lately. However, I’m not deeply in love with Hadoop. If something better came along, I wouldn’t shed too many tears. Particularly if that something better wasn’t written in Java.

That’s why I was excited to check out the cloud mapreduce implementation of MR, which claims to have a 60x speed gain on Hadoop in only 3kLoC. This incredible feat was accomplished by using more of the Amazon cloud “os” than Hadoop supports (it’s built around S3 & SQS) and eliminating the task tracker node.

Pair programming is one of the more interesting trends in the profession of software creation. It’s particularly interesting to me because it is the primary issue on which I differ from the thought leaders. In this essay, I examine some of my worries about the general applicability of this practice.